By GINNA PARSONS

TUPELO, Miss. (AP) — Some Tupelo High School students flail around for weeks or months, agonizing over a subject for a senior project. For Emily Corban, all it took was a walk in the woods.

Corban, a cross country team member, was checking out a new running trail at Ballard Park that was under construction last fall for the team when she spied a pond that was being used as a dump.

Her mother said it made for an easy decision.

‘‘When she saw this the first time we walked the course, she said, ’I want to clean this up for my senior project,’’’ said Kathy Corban, a sixth-grade teacher at Carver Elementary.

Like other seniors, 18-year-old Emily Corban had to complete an intensive yearlong project that included research, an essay and a community evaluation as a requirement for graduation.

She began her work in January after consulting with her project mentor, Clay Stewart, of Stewart Environmental Construction. Together,they came up with a plan.

‘‘I said we’re either going to have to drain it or try to refurbish it,’’ Stewart said. ‘‘And she said, ’Let’s refurbish it.’’’

Protecting the environment isn’t new to Emily Corban. When she was about 13, she saw a series of television ads on Nickelodeon encouraging kids to spend five minutes a day picking up trash to recycle to help reduce their carbon footprint.

‘‘Recycling wasn’t popular here then. It was difficult,’’ Emily Corban said. ‘‘I couldn’t drive yet and it would take forever to get my mom to take me to the recycling place to drop off stuff I’d collected.’’

From that point on, Emily Corban was hooked. When her mother wasn’t looking, she’d sneak energy-efficient light bulbs into the grocery cart. She began recycling everything, including dragging home cardboard pizza boxes from church youth group gatherings, picking up plastic water bottles discarded at cross country meets and digging yogurt containers out of the family’s trash.

The teenager even went before the Tupelo City Council in 2006 to sing the praises of curbside recycling.

‘‘I taped the words, ’Forever in a landfill,’ on the lid of our trash can at home so that whenever I go to put something in, I have to lift the lid knowingly and know it’s going to be there, in a landfill, forever,’’ Emily Corban said. ‘‘When they fill up, what are we going to do?’’

Stewart’s plan for the pond, which is on the very northern end of the cross country trail near the northeast corner of the new baseball complex, included clearing brush around the area and picking up trash.

‘‘There are several small ponds along the way, but this one was a bit larger,’’ Stewart said. ‘‘It had been abused, basically used as a dump site.’’

One recent spring day, Emily Corban spent the afternoon in waders, picking up trash from the bottom of the chest-high water. Glass bottles got chucked onto the pond bank. Car tires proved a bit more cumbersome to retrieve.

‘‘I don’t get it,’’ Emily Corban said, shaking her head. ‘‘It’s water — our drinking source — that people are dumping into.’’

The petite brunette rattled off a list of items she’s retrieved so far from the pond and the surrounding area: a microwave oven, children’s shoes, a bowling ball bag, old-fashioned light bulbs, men’s work boots and enough glass and plastic bottles to fill a dozen large garbage bags.

‘‘I take the bags back to the house and go through them to see if there’s anything we can recycle,’’ she said. ‘‘I use any metal for art and recycle the plastic.’’

Hank Boerner, a longtime neighbor of the Corbans, has helped the senior along the way, picking up trash and tree limbs to help clear the site around the pond.

‘‘Emily’s always been environmentally aware — a little environmental Nazi,’’ he said. ‘‘She is just all over it. She’s kind of taken an area that was a dump, a pit, and turned it into a respite. Before it was a place for mosquitoes to breed and people to dump.’’

Even though her senior project work wraps up soon, she plans to work on the pond at least through May.

‘‘I wish I had started on it earlier because I could have gotten more done,’’ she said.

Tupelo Parks and Recreation Department Director Don Lewis said Emily Corban should be the one to name the pond because of all the work she’s done to help beautify the area.

Boerner agreed.

‘‘There needs to be a sign there saying ’Emily’s Pond,’ because that’s what it is,’’ he said. ‘‘It’s going to make a real nice addition to Ballard Park.’’